Category Archives: Woodrow Wilson

I hope everyone has been enjoying the day. I wanted to share this extraordinary poster from 1918 urging Americans to purchase was savings stamps. I think it illustrates–quite literally–that peace, if we can even call it that, was a tenuous thing six weeks after the Armistice. Americans and their allies were occupying Germany. Allied troops were also stationed in remote, freezing Siberia. This was in the wake of the assassination of the czar and his family. These were the early stages of the Russian Civil War.

“Our Soldiers in Siberia!”: This 1918 Christmas poster of a doughboy in Russia accompanied by a Czech or Slovak counterpart reminded Americans at the time of how fragile peace was after the Armistice and, intentionally or not, hinted of strains to come at the Versailles negotiating table.

Theodore Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill on Christmas Day afternoon after having spend almost two months in a Manhattan hospital. In early December he had been too infirm even to walk; he was also blind in one eye and still feeling the effects of the jungle disease that had nearly killed him four years earlier on his expedition down the River of Doubt. Despite all this, there was nonetheless talk that Christmas week of 1918 of Colonel Roosevelt traveling to Europe to participate in the peace negotiations. Colonel Roosevelt quickly dispelled these rumors. Franklin Roosevelt, still the assistant secretary of the navy, was scheduled to sail for Europe aboard the Leviathan on December 31 to start wrapping up naval contracts and other business. Already in Europe was Woodrow Wilson, who spent December 25 in Chaumont, France with Pershing and the troops before heading to London. American and allied troops were also in Siberia, and General Pershing was talking over Christmas about transferring an entire division from Germany there to further support them.

The reference in the poster to the Čecho-Slováks–peoples formerly under rule of the now-dissolved Austro-Hungarian Empire–hints at the complexity of the task Wilson and other leaders would face when trying to put the world back together. 1919 would be a fraught time.

Note that it was called the “World’s Series” when Brooklyn and Boston squared off in 1916. The American League games were held in the more spacious Boston Braves ballpark to sell more tickets than possible in the much smaller Fenway Park.

I was having a conversation with some students yesterday explaining that the name of the National League team currently playing in the World Series took its name from the period during which the team played in Brooklyn. Fans had to dodge the streetcars to get to the ballpark and thus became known as trolley dodgers. In 1916 however that was still a little ways in the future; the Brooklyn team that played the Red Sox in that year’s World Series was known as the Robins. Charles Ebbets was already the owner by this time. Later in the day I was speaking to someone whose daughter lives in Boston but whose family roots are in Los Angeles. We got into a discussion about how some of those great Dodger players of the 1970s and early 1980s will hopefully be in attendance over the coming week, throwing out first pitches and whatnot. Red Sox Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski threw out the opening pitch in game one last night.

The last time the team that is now the Dodgers played the Red Sox in the World Series was 1916. Seasons ended earlier in those years, with the final game usually taking place around Columbus Day. In October 1916 the Battles of Verdun and the Somme were grinding to their awful conclusions. It was the final weeks of the presidential campaign and the incumbent Woodrow Wilson was running against challenger Charles Evans Hughes on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War.” Fenway Park was in its fifth season in 1916, but if you look at the score book above you will see that the games in Boston were played not in Fenway but at Braves Field. I was wondering about this when I saw the score card. During the game last night the Red Sox radio announcers eventually spoke about it, noting that the games were moved to the more spacious ballpark to see more tickets. Let that be a lesson to anyone who thinks organized baseball was once only a game and not a business. I say that with no cynicism.

Babe Ruth, Casey Stengel, Fred Merkle and Tris Speaker were just some of the players who squared off in the World Series 102 years ago. Lincoln Logs were invented that year, presumably due to interest in the 16th president just a few years after the centenary of his birth and in the wake of the 50th anniversary of the American Civil War. It was the final season before America joined the Great War. While Europe burned Americans took in the World Series to forget the world’s troubles as best they could.

I am having my coffee and a bite to eat before heading off to the Tomb. I see it is raining. It is too early to tell how it might effect the event at Sakura Park that runs from 12:00 – 8:00. I am watching the progress of Hurricane Florence as well. In addition to the terrible havoc it might unleash on many lives and communities, it may effect next week’s Camp Doughboy weekend on Governors Island. We will keep our fingers crossed that the Florence, and the storm building behind it, do not turn into major tragedies.

You Can’t Raise Two Flags at Once, Brooklyn Daily Eagle August 9, 1915

I was gathering my notes yesterday for next week’s talk about John Purroy Mitchel and came across this political cartoon which I thought I would quickly share. It is from the August 9, 1915 Brooklyn Daily Eagle and, coincidentally or not, is positioned next to an article about Mitchel’s participation in the Plattsburg training camp that summer. The cartoon shows Theodore Roosevelt explaining the dangers of what he and his supporters called hyphenated-Americanism during the Great War. The United States was not yet in the war when this cartoon was published. This was, however, just three months after the sinking of the Lusitania. The tension between Roosevelt, General Leonard Wood, Mayor Mitchel and other Preparedness advocates against President Wilson was building.

Just a few weeks after this cartoon appeared Roosevelt gave a controversial speech at Plattsburg taking the Wilson Administration to task for what he saw as its poor response to the war. General Wood was in attendance in Plattsburg with Roosevelt and later reprimanded by Secretary of War Lindley Garrison.

Here is some stunning footage of John Purroy Mitchell’s funeral at St. Patrick’s one hundred years ago today. Note Theodore Roosevelt and, I believe, Charles Evans Hughes, who ran against Wilson in 1916, walking behind the casket as the pallbearers take Mitchel into the cathedral.

The have my article up and running over at Roads to the Great War about the life, times, and death of John Purroy Mitchel. New York City’s Boy Mayor was all of thirty-four when he became mayor in 1914. Initially he was an ally of Woodrow Wilson, who in 1913 had appointed him Collector of the Port of New York. Men like Chester Arthur had previously held the collectorship. Mitchel and Wilson soon had a falling out over what the mayor saw as the president’s poor leadership during the war. Soon, Mitchel was very publicly allying with friends like Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood advocating for Preparedness. When he lost his re-election bid, Mitchel became a military aviator. He died in a flight exercise in Louisiana on July 6, 1918, one hundred years ago today.

Ronald Reagan signed the bill creating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in November 1983, fifteen years after King’s death.

I would be remiss if I did not pause and write a few words on this, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was less than a year old when he was killed in Memphis. Oddly however, the older I get the more events like this seem less like “history” and more like current events. Here in full-blown middle-age, my entire concept of time has evolved. When my father was alive he lived within a few hour’s drive from Memphis. I visited each summer I would usually borrow his car and take an overnight side trip to somewhere or other. More than once that place was Memphis. I visited the Lorraine Hotel, site of the King assassination and home today to the National Civil Rights Museum, more than once. Walking in the vicinity one could see the empty lots that were the results of the riots and, later, urban renewal. I have not been there now in many years, but I believe that gentrification is at last moving things along.

I remember when MLK Jr. Day became a holiday in the early 1980s. Again, at the time I thought his death was part of some ancient past, and yet the creation of the holiday was only fifteen years after the shooting. The evolution of the holiday itself has a convoluted history, one mired in national and even international events. A search of the New York Times digital archive from 1983 pulls up all kinds of articles about the unresolved issues of the Civil Rights Movement as well as commentary from TASS, the Soviet news agency, offering their cynical take on the drama of the holiday hanging in the balance. When King was assassinated the Tet Offensive was in its fifth week. Bobby Kennedy gave the eulogy for King and would himself be assassinated two months later. All that spring and summer there were riots and political upheaval across the United States, in Paris, Czechoslovakia, and Mexico City just before the Summer Olympics.

Viewed a certain way, King’s activities can be seen in the context of the World Wars. His assassination came just fifty years after Woodrow Wilson issued his Fourteen Points, and twenty-seven years after FDR announced the Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union address. King knew these things. It is not an accident that the Civil Rights Movement here in the U.S., and Independence Movements around the world, developed how and when they did. One can’t help but think of things like Ho Chi Minh at Versailles after the Armistice pleading his case for an independent Vietnam. King was reluctant to speak publicly against Lyndon Johnson because of all the president had done for Civil Rights, but in the year before his assassination King’s denunciations of the war in Southeast Asia became increasingly strident. In the library where I work, over the past fifteen years, a colleague and I have been ordering the King Papers as they have incrementally released. The historiography on the release of someone’s correspondence is itself a fascinating genre. History is a humbling thing and the deeper one goes the more one sees the relationships between what are very complicated events.

Today is Opening Day of the baseball season. I think it might be an intriguing summer here in New York. The Mets and Yanks are looking pretty good. Time will tell.

John Kinley Tener, governor of Pennsylvania and president-elect of the National League, throws out the first pitch in Brooklyn, April 1914. Four years later he would discourage NL owners from starting afternoon games an hour later during the newly-inaugurated Daylight Savings Time.

Opening Day 1918 came of April 15, which was about normal for the era; in the years of the 154-game season and no divisional playoffs, baseball started much later than today. In the weeks leading up to that season’s first pitch, baseball had an interesting issue to think through: what to do about Daylight Savings Time. Congress passed and President Wilson signed the bill creating DST in mid-March 1918. Perhaps not surprisingly the innovative Germans were the first country to try Daylight Savings during the Great War, starting the practice in 1916. The Brits, French, Dutch, Italians, Scandinavians and others quickly followed suit. It was thus inevitable the Americans would institute it as well. Daylight Saving Time here in the United States began at 2:00 am Sunday March 31, 1918. It also happened to be Easter.

Baseball teams, especially in the National League, began discussing the merits of moving weekday games from 3:30 to 4:30 pm at the time of the passing of the legislation in mid-March. Executives believed that moving games back an hour would boost revenue at the turnstiles because it would be easier for people to come to the game from work. It was the extra hour of sunlight made the potential time shift possible. Remember, night games did not begin until the mid-1930s. Much of official Washington vehemently opposed the idea, noting that the Daylight Savings measure was intended not for entertainment purposes but to save resources such as gas and coal, and to boost productivity in the munitions factories.

For several weeks after the legislative passing of Daylight Saving Time, Charles Ebbets and other owners contemplated moving games back an hour to boost attendance. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle captured Ebbets’s decision a few weeks prior to Opening Day.

One man in agreement with this was National League president John Kinley Tener. The Irish-born Tener grew up in Pittsburgh and took to baseball as a young immigrant. He participated in Albert G. Spalding’s world baseball tour in the late 1880s. Tener played for Cap Anson’s Chicago Nationals (today’s Cubs) in 1888 and 1889 and then did a brief stint in the Players League in 1890. A Republican, Tener served in the U.S. Congress from 1909-11 and then became governor of Pennsylvania. It was while serving in Harrisburg that the National League owners voted him president in December 1913. He took the job with the condition that he finish out his gubernatorial term. Tener took the National League reins in 1915.

As early as March 19, 1918, when Daylight Savings Time became law, some baseball executives began advocating for the 4:30 start. Officially the National League Office had no position and left the matter up to individual clubs. The New York Giants wanted to move to 4:30 to better accommodate subway commuters. Charlie Ebbets, owner of the Brooklyn Robins (later the Dodgers), too was keen on the shift. Ban Johnson, president of the American League, split the difference and advocated for a 4:00 start time for his clubs. Johnson’s National League counterpart, Tener, made clear his preference that teams stay with the 3:30 start time. Ebbets eventually bowed to the pressure and kept his team’s schedule as it was in past seasons.

This past week we showed to a class the first cut of our World War One film. For homework the students are now reading a series of excerpts from the Library of America’s World War I and America: Told by the Americans who Lived It. Historian A. Scott Berg, the author of a 2013 biography of Woodrow Wilson, edited the work. For Thursday the students read Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” which appeared originally in Hemingway’s 1925 collection In Our Time. While preparing for the class I came across an essay by Philip Caputo that appeared this month in the online journal Literary Hub. Caputo was a marine who in 1965 landed at Da Nang during Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. In 1977 he published his seminal memoir A Rumor of War. That book secured Caputo’s reputation as a writer. Now in his seventies he has written many more works since the publication of Rumor forty years ago. He published a new novel just this year.

Ernest Hemingway in an American Red Cross ambulance, Italy 1918. Though he spent just two weeks at the front, the intensity of the experience influenced Hemingway deeply.

The reason I say all this is because Caputo makes an interesting point in his essay: many of the best war writers actually spent only a small amount of time in combat. The reason these are the writers who write most eloquently about the combat experience, Caputo speculates, is because warfare is just that intense. Endure it too long and it becomes too much a part of you. Caputo uses Ernest Hemingway as the most striking example. For all we associate him with war, Hemingway spent just two weeks on the front lines during the Great War. He graduated high school in June 1917, wrote for the Kansas City Star from that October to April 1918, quit the paper and volunteered for ambulance duty that spring, sailed in May, worked in war torn Paris for much of June, was wounded in Italy on July 8, coalesced in a Milanese hospital for six months, and was home in Oak Park, Illinois by January 1919.

Chronologically the time may have been short, but the intensity of it led to his incredible output over the next decade. A husband and father by the early 1920s, he paid the bills as a foreign correspondent in Europe for the Toronto Star, where among other things he covered the Genoa Conference in 1922; met leaders such as David Lloyd George, Benito Mussolini, and Georges Clemenceau among others;covered the rise of Fascism and Bolshevism; and witnessed the general anomie of European society in the wake of the Great War. In this same decade he published In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and A Farewell to Arms (1929), all of which draw to greater or lesser extent on what he witnessed and experienced during his short time in the war zone.

As August 1917 wound down the officers and men of what was now the 27th Division prepared to leave for Spartanburg, South Carolina. They were supposed to go several weeks earlier but bureaucratic snafus in the War Department prevented that from happening. Things were now as in place as they were going to get. Before the division left, the people of New York prepared a three-day fête to see the men off. On Tuesday 28 August about 500 people showed up at the Biltmore Hotel to honor Major General John F. O’Ryan, the division’s commander. There seemed to be a conscious attempt to play up the Irish aspect of the evening. Mayor Mitchel was one of the organizers and T.P. O’Connor gave the keynote. Broadway turned silent film star William Courtleigh was the master of ceremonies. The evening was quite reserved and understated; organizers were trying to Hooverize–conserve in the name of the war effort–as much as they could.

It had been a hectic few days. Later the past week New York State’s attorney general had placed O’Ryan on the New York National Guard inactive list. This was because President Wilson and the Senate had appointed O’Ryan, and most all militia officers, in the National Army a few weeks back. That had put O’Ryan’s militia status somewhat in question. O’Ryan had spent much of this time visiting his regiments out in the field. Many of them were camped out in municipal parks. Brooklyn’s Twenty-Third Infantry Regiment for instance was training in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The time to move on was near and people were gathering. All of O’Ryan’s staff were on hand at the Biltmore dinner as well. The dinner was just the lead-up to what was to come over the following two days.

On the afternoon of Thursday 23 August 1917 Private Alonzo Edwards, Company L, Third Battalion, Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment, was arrested for interceding with two white police officers in the arrest of Houston resident Sara Travers. That incident triggered a series of events culminating in a night of spectacular violence that would leave almost twenty people dead and many more wounded, some of them mortally. It led to three trials over the next seven months that gripped Americans and challenged assumptions about race and Jim Crow segregation. It required the attention of local law enforcement officials, military authorities, the Secretary of War, and ultimately President Woodrow Wilson himself. Finally, it led to the hanging deaths of nineteen African-American soldiers and life sentences for scores of others. I wrote this piece in different form for a class almost fifteen years ago and wanted to share it on the anniversary of one of worst days in American history.

The Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment

The Twenty-Fourth’s baseball team in an undated photograph

The Twenty-Fourth Infantry Regiment had a long history of service. In the decades after the Civil War these Buffalo Soldiers protected communication and supply lines during the Indian Campaigns, and in 1898 went up San Juan Heights with Theodore Roosevelt. They fought in the Philippine Insurrection and in 1916 were stationed in New Mexico under the leadership of Brigadier General John J. Pershing, protecting supply lines between Columbus, New Mexico and Ojo Federico, Mexico. The Third Battalion of the Twenty-Fourth arrived in Houston on 28 July 1917. Things got off to a bad start. The Twenty-Fourth had less than half the officers assigned to a full regiment, and two of its companies were commanded by first lieutenants, not captains. The quality of this leadership was poor, as many white officers did not want a commission leading negro troops. Conditions were spartan and the soldiers were camped on the outskirts of town between the city limits and a more established base for whites called Camp Logan, where the men pulled guard duty. Cramped conditions in a hot and humid Southern city, far away from the action in Europe was bad enough. Dealing with the Jim Crow restrictions was worse. Relations between the soldiers and the local civilians were tense. The presence of the Twenty-Fourth, however, raised expectations in the local African-American community.

The Riot

In action prior to the transfer to Houston

Tensions simmered for weeks in the summer heat and when the riot came it happened quickly. In the early afternoon of 23 August Private Edwards asked two police officers why they were arresting Ms. Travers and for this was himself detained. A few hours later Corporal Charles Baltimore of the Twenty-Fourth’s Third Battalion went to police headquarters in his capacity as a military policeman to check on Private Edwards’ status. A scuffle ensued in which Baltimore was shot at, apprehended, beaten, and taken into custody. A rumor spread quickly to the base that Baltimore had been killed. By nightfall a contingent of 125-150 soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth had amassed and began marching from their camp into Houston. In the succeeding hours, the armed soldiers killed four policemen and eleven residents, wounded an additional dozen, and caused intense panic in the city. Four men from the Twenty-Fourth Regiment lost their lives.

The Aftermath

Generals Pershing and Bliss inspect the 24th camp during the Punitive Expedition, 1916

News spread rapidly throughout the country of the Houston incident. The New York Times had a small article, way below the fold, on page one of the 24 August edition sketching out the still-hazy details. A day later the newspaper had a significantly larger article, this time above the fold. Over the seven months there were no less than three trials relating to the Houston riot. The first court-martial was in November 1917 and led to the hanging of thirteen soldiers and life sentences for forty-one others. The next two trials concluded in December 1917 and March 1918. The punishment called for a total of sixteen death sentences and prison sentences of varying lengths for thirty-six other individuals. This time the government’s position was more cautious. Secretary of War Newton Baker wrote to President Wilson counseling that the number of death sentences in the two cases be reduced to six, with the remaining commuted to life sentences. Wilson acted on Baker’s recommendations.